Two Minutes to Midnight
by Scribe Teradia
Summary: George finds a new way to ring in the new year.
1. Two Minutes to Midnight

**Disclaimer:** I don't own J.K. Rowling's universe, I just like to play with her characters, on occasion.

**Author's Note:** Written as a birthday present for a dear lj friend.

**Two Minutes to Midnight**

by Scribe Teradia

As the seconds ticked ever closer to the new year, George wondered for at least the hundredth time in the last hour what the hell he was doing in Paris on New Year's Eve. He couldn't even fall back on the excuse that it had seemed like a good idea at the time; when Fleur had first brought it up, six months ago, he'd _known_ it was a bad idea.

It wasn't that he objected to the family spending the holidays together (and even if he had, he knew better than to voice that objection in front of his mum), although he was quite put out to learn that Charlie was able to find an acceptable excuse. Charlie, however, had the benefit of being in Romania, whereas George was still in merry old England and well within mum's reach. Still, he'd have felt better about it if he hadn't been strong-armed into bringing Angelina along as his date, and he still hadn't forgiven his mother for springing _that_ little surprise on him.

He should never have allowed himself to become involved with his dead brother's girlfriend. What had started as friendship, bonding in their time of grief, had turned into a relationship almost without his involvement; Angelina had done all of the flirting, most of the kissing, and much of the work when they finally ended up in bed. She swore she didn't see him as a replacement for Fred (which was smart of her, because Fred had been the brave one, when it came right down to it, as evidenced by George's easy capitulation to her feminine wiles), but he wasn't entirely sure he hadn't been using _her_ to hold onto what little his brother had left behind. She and Fred had shared something that George had never had, and by hanging onto her George sometimes felt like he was hanging onto part of Fred; he knew it was wrong, but he was too much the coward to be honest even with himself, never mind everyone else.

Which is how he'd wound up in Paris for the last two weeks of the year, with Angelina. He hadn't the guts to stand up to his mum when she mentioned the trip in front of Angelina, and then he hadn't the guts to stand up to _Angelina_ when she'd turned those big brown eyes on him and said they should go. They'd been the worst two weeks of his life, barring the time right after the war. Paris in the holiday season was spectacular, beautiful and romantic... and it turned a bright light on every ugly thing that was wrong with their relationship. Angelina had wasted no time in telling him this, and he'd endured her tantrums silently until the final blowup this evening, just before the party, when she'd finally told him it was over. George figured he was lucky she didn't hex him into oblivion at seeing the relief in his expression, but instead they'd both gone down to the hotel ballroom where she proceeded to get exceedingly drunk.

He should have skipped the party and found an international portkey back home, but being the glutton for punishment that he was, he wolfed down some nibbles and sipped a glass of champagne, looking around the room and trying to pretend he wasn't hating every second. Cue Complication #137 (because his life wasn't nearly complicated enough already): Fleur's no-longer-quite-so-little sister, Gabrielle. He tried to remember if he'd been told she was coming, and was just deciding he hadn't when he saw the look of surprise on Fleur's face that confirmed her sister hadn't precisely been invited. Fleur, being Fleur, was quick to recover her poise and grace, but the tension between sisters was evident even all the way across the room where George was standing. Gabrielle's date broke it by tugging her away to dance, and people stopped staring at the quarter-veela sisters as if expecting them to throw down in the middle of the floor. George wondered absently how many of those attending knew that Gabrielle's ancestry had manifested with a vengeance when she was sixteen and staying with her sister, resulting in her nearly seducing her brother-in-law when it happened.

Shaking himself out of his thoughts, George spotted Angelina across the room helping herself to another glass of champagne, and he drained his own in sympathy. One of those charming young Frenchman who seemed to be everywhere was chatting her up, and George found himself almost surprised by his utter lack of jealousy, though he wished they'd bothered to discuss sleeping arrangements. It would be terrifically awkward to return to the room only to find her shagging the pretty-boy. He checked his watch again: two minutes to midnight.

A hand on his arm had him turning, but he smelled her before he caught sight of her; the rose and vanilla perfume was distinctive and unforgettable. Gabrielle was half a head shorter than he was, though her improbably high heels made up for some of that difference in height. George swallowed, set his glass on a nearby table, and gave her a nod of greeting. "Hello, Gabrielle."

"Bonsoir, George." Her pronunciation of his name had gotten better, and her voice was different than when he'd heard it last. Deeper, richer, the voice of a woman now, with a subtle hint of a seductive purr that he suspected had everything to do with her veela heritage. Her eyes were a deep blue, her pale gold hair fell in ringlets to just past her shoulders, and she had quite a few more curves than he remembered. "Zey tell me zat you are to marry? Zis Angelina pairson?"

Fortunately, he'd already set his empty glass aside, so he couldn't throw it at anyone. George shook his head. "Mum wishes I would. She's going to have my liver for breakfast when she finds out we broke up." It was, at present, the least of his worries, which said something about his evening, he was sure.

"Non?" He could swear she looked relieved. "Zen may I ask you for zis dance?"

George stared at her. "That's a joke, right? You're having one on at my expense."

"I would nevair do zat to you." She looked mildly offended at the suggestion, and he had to wonder why she'd sought him out in the first place.

"Gabrielle," he explained, patiently, "it's less than two minutes to midnight. We go out there now, and we'll be on the floor during the countdown. You do know what happens at the end of that countdown, right?" Did they even do that sort of thing at parties in Paris? Surely they did, he'd heard somewhere that it was a universally Western custom.

"Oui." Her smile showed her teeth, and while he shouldn't have found such a smile to be dangerous, he had to admit it wasn't a reassuring expression. "At ze end of ze count-down, zair ees a keess." She arched a brow at him, and he knew for sure he was in trouble even before she asked, "Are you saying you do not want to keess me?"

A dozen epithets crowded his brain for two seconds and were swept aside by a tide of hormones that very much wanted to kiss the pretty lady, which were then wrestled away from making him say anything stupid by the valiant effort of his outnumbered rational thought. "Uhm."

She reached up to take hold of his lapels with both delicate hands, pulling herself closer to him, and the purr rose up in her voice as she queried, "Or ees eet that you do not want to keess me een front of your maman?"

The tidal wave of hormones threatened to overwhelm him again, but fortunately his survival instincts were still stronger than his libido, and George let out a nervous chuckle. "My mum. Your sister. It's a tossup which of them would flay me first." He half expected one or the other of them to appear out of the crowd and start shrieking at him for being as close to her as he already was.

Gabrielle slid her hands upward, her fingernails grazing the sides of his neck, and pulled herself up onto her toes to press herself full-length against him. The scent of her perfume swirled around him, and her breath was warm against his ear as she purred, "Pairhaps we should find somewhair quiet for you to keess me, oui?"

Before he was really aware of what he was doing, he'd wrapped an arm around her waist, half-lifting her in the process and pressing her body even closer to his, in order to make use of the conveniently-nearby exit. As the door closed behind them, he set her down and backed her into the nearest wall, freeing one hand to take hold of her chin and tilt her face up so that he could finally kiss her.

She tasted like champagne and honey and something he couldn't quite identify but was fairly sure wasn't good for him at all. Her body was molded against his as though she'd been made to fit, her curves aligned in all the right places to do irreparable damage to his self-control, and for the life of him he couldn't remember why he'd ever thought this would be a bad idea.

A warning bell went off in his head, but she must have read his mind or something because she lifted one leg, her knee brushing against his thigh, and the warning disappeared as though it had never existed. If he'd been even remotely capable of rational thought, he might have chalked it up to the fact that her veela powers were supposed to be nigh-succubus-like, but that small detail probably wouldn't have deterred him any in the long run.

Somehow, they made it up at least two flights of stairs, down a hallway, and into a room that George didn't recognize but sincerely hoped didn't belong to someone else. Clothes were shed in a frenzy of hurried, hungry kisses, leaving a trail of fabric from the door to the bed, and then things got even more interesting. Gabrielle without clothes was even more attractive than Gabrielle _with_ clothes, and all the memories he had of the girl were shoved aside now that he was confronted with the woman she'd become. They fell to the bed together in a tangle of limbs, mouths and hands exploring, wrestling for control until they finally collapsed together, spent and sated among sheets damp with sweat. It was, George reflected later, the best way to ring in the new year he'd ever experienced, and with that thought came the desire to repeat that experience.

Angelina had been a mistake, and it was past time he was honest with everyone about it, including himself. Gabrielle, on the other hand, had made him feel alive in a way no one else had ever done, especially not since he'd lost Fred. He wasn't going to fool himself into thinking she could replace his dead twin, but for the first time he considered seriously the thought that he didn't have to try filling that void. One thing was certain, though: he wasn't about to let her go, now that he'd found her.


	2. The Next Morning

**Part Two: The Next Morning**

Someone was pounding on the door.

At first, George had been convinced that the pounding was some sort of giant-beaten drum, what with the way it made his head pound in sympathy. Then he'd made the mistake of cracking an eyelid open, only to have the previously protected eye seared by the blindingly bright winter sunshine pouring in through the windows. Turning his head away so fast he wrenched his neck, he'd become aware of the fact that he wasn't alone in the bed, and he went utterly still as he tried to piece together the hazy, alcohol-fogged memories of the night before.

He remembered fighting with Angelina, or rather Angelina hurling insults and abuse at him while he'd stood there and said nothing, both of them dressed to the nines for the party. Of the party, he remembered very little after the first couple of glasses of champagne. Fleur had looked radiant, as per usual, even when Gabrielle...

Oh, bloody hell.

George risked opening his eye again, as well as the other one, to confirm what he'd initially thought was a hangover-induced hallucination. Gabrielle lay stretched out alongside him in the bed, pale gold curls fanned across the pillow like a halo and gleaming in the indecently bright sunshine. The sheets were a tangled mess (dimly, George thought it a wonder the sheets were still on the bed after the previous night's activities), but somehow they managed to cover her body almost modestly while still revealing alluring little bits of bare skin here and there that bypassed his still-struggling-to-wake-up rational thought and went directly to his libido... the side-effect of which was not likely to be helpful in the least to his current situation.

The pounding got louder, which he wouldn't have thought was possible until it actually happened, and he could swear he heard someone calling his name from the other side of the suite's outer door. It sounded rather disturbingly like his eldest brother, though he couldn't think of any reason why Bill should be calling for him. Correction, he didn't _want_ to think of any such reason, as he looked rather guiltily at the stunning creature still sleeping beside him.

"Tell zem to go away?" Her accent-laden voice, muzzy with sleep and afterglow, was the sexiest thing he'd ever heard, and it abruptly woke up parts of his body that were bound to get him into even more trouble.

"Yeah." George was agreeing with her on principle, but he wasn't at all confident in his ability to make whoever was causing such a racket actually go away. He overrode the objections of most of his body and slid out of bed, casting around for his clothes briefly before finally shrugging into one of the robes provided by the hotel, figuring he was better off appearing at the door in something that didn't show obvious signs of being removed in a hurry. "I'm coming!" he called, hoping the response would earn him a reprieve from the door-pounding as he headed out of the bedroom and toward the continuing racket.

"Not yet, you're not," purred the Frenchwoman in the bed. George turned around to find she'd rolled over onto her stomach, the gleaming curls tumbling over her shoulders in a way that wasn't remotely angelic, the sheet only barely preserving her modesty, and even then only in the most technical sense. She looked for all the world like the very goddess of lust, and when she crooked a finger in his direction he felt a wave of raw need wash over him that nearly brought him to his knees (all the better to crawl back to bed to worship at the altar of Gabrielle, or so the little voice of his libido was whispering in what was left of his brain).

Naturally, that was when the manager finally succumbed to the pleas of his loving family and unlocked the outer door to the suite so that they could see if 'poor, distraught George' was all right.

Bill was the first one through the door, followed closely by Fleur and then both Molly and Arthur Weasley. The hotel manager hovered in the doorway, his eyes wide as he stared at the tableau presented by Gabrielle the sex kitten and George with the sizable tent in his bathrobe. Nobody said a word for a full minute, then the manager made an appalled sort of squeaking sound and chaos erupted.

"How dare you?" Bill's roar was the loudest, echoed in various voices and turns of phrase by the others in the room, and it took George a moment to process that it wasn't _him_ they were yelling at. He blinked rapidly as accusations were hurled at Gabrielle for, of all things, 'taking advantage' of him in his 'wounded, fragile state' (Mum's words, as Bill's contained a number of choice expletives).

"Hang on," he protested, slightly offended that they seemed fixated on blaming everything on Gabrielle. When they ignored him, he managed to get himself moving, and got between his family and the woman in the bed, raising his voice to shout over them. "Excuse me!"

It wasn't until they were all staring at him that he realized he had been shouting; he tried to remember the last time he'd shouted, about anything, and came up blank. He and Fred had had other ways of getting attention from the family, and in the years since his twin's untimely death George had neither needed nor wanted much in the way of attention. Until now.

He looked at the four of them, a dozen different things running through his head, trying to decide what he should say. Finally, he straightened his shoulders, lifted his chin and took a deep breath. The silence was deafening, unbroken while they waited for him to speak, and he made a mental note to reconsider the whole shouting thing later.

"Sod it," George huffed, backing into the bedroom.

"George!" his mother scolded, a sentiment echoed by his father and brother.

"I don't need to explain myself," he flung back at her. "I'm a grown-up, for Merlin's sake, I can make my own bloody decisions!"

She was starting to harangue him about his choice of language when he slammed the bedroom door, cutting off the renewed protests. He leaned against it, his head turning automatically toward Gabrielle as his brain remembered her presence (not that his _body_ had forgotten about her).

Gabrielle was sitting up in the bed, the sheet pulled up in a token effort of preserving her modesty, which did nothing whatsoever to conceal her allure. "Zat was well done," she said, her voice holding a note of admiration in it as well as something he couldn't quite identify.

"Won't hold them long," he said, desperately trying to reassert control over his libido. He tore his gaze away from her and bent over to paw through the pile of clothes on the floor, locating his cast-off trousers and fumbling in the pockets. After a few moments of frantic searching, he found what he was looking for and straightened, holding his hand out to Gabrielle. "Come on, we need to get out of here."

"What - ?" she began, clutching the bedclothes around her with one hand even as she reached for him with the other.

"No time." George took his hand, spared a glance to make sure she was touching the highly illegal portkey he'd been carrying since his days on the run with Fred during the war, and breathed the command word to activate it.

By the time Bill broke the bedroom door down (much to the dismay of the hotel manager), a minute later, the room was empty.


End file.
